


Blood and Glitter

by Cambusmore



Category: Treeful of Starling - Hawksley Workman (Album)
Genre: Apocalypse, BAMF Women, F/F, Ghosts, Women Being Awesome
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-09
Updated: 2015-01-09
Packaged: 2018-03-06 19:50:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 17,811
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3146522
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cambusmore/pseuds/Cambusmore
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A double act on its last legs detours to a hotel and faces the end of the world.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Blood and Glitter

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Deepdarkwaters](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Deepdarkwaters/gifts).



> Now I can finally stop pretending I don't listen to this album every day.
> 
> Thanks to TheFierceBeast and Cicak for unconditional love.

-1-

_But some are happy in the bluest sky_   
_And others search in the dark of night_   
_And sadness is a silent right_

 

It’s too early in the morning for speech. That’s fine. They don’t need to talk a lot of the time anyway, even though the silences have stretched past comfortable lately. They move down the narrow hallway in tandem, large Starbucks in hand, the respective noises of their shoes abbreviated by the egg boxes on the walls. There exists a whole scale of sound particular to radio stations and Fran’s never managed to get used to it.

In the holding room, they still don’t talk, just listen and nod at the brisk producer reminding them they can’t say cunt on the air at 8 in the morning as if they were teenage boys being handed mics for the first time and told sternly not to use bad words or else. It makes Fran really, really want to say cunt. The producer scurries back into the studio and they sit and wait to be ushered in. As always, Eilish seems unable to stay within the space allotted to her, her legs spread and feet pointed in her boots, her elbows over both arm rests. Her phone clicks like a geiger counter as she types because she never mutes it. It’ll probably go off in the interview, but she will smile and be forgiven. A few minutes later, they are motioned in impatiently and rush to get in their seats and fiddle with their headphones, which the DJ insists on calling ‘cans’ no less than four times, only to have to sit through the local weather and news, as well as some adverts for adult nappies and a cat spa.

“And we’re back from paying the bills, I’m Rich Parfitt on Ridge Radio and we have some very special guests with us here in studio today: it’s only Eilish Hershel and Fran Archer from Crooked Usage! Welcome, ladies”

The use of ‘ladies’ is never a good sign.

“Hello.”

“Hi, thank you for having us.”

“So, this is the end?

“Of?”

“Of the tour.”

“Yeah, nearly.” 

“What did you think I meant there?”

Forced laughter all around, although it might be genuine enough from Rich who probably always laughs at his own jokes like a cruise-ship compère.

“This is our second to last date on the tour.”

“The penultimate.”

“And how are you feeling at this late stage?”

“Enraged.”

“We only communicate through semaphore.”

 “I’d quite like some fruit. I’ve nearly forgotten what it looks like.”

“Oh, I’m sure a banana could be arranged, eh Producer Pete?”

 _Oh dear_ , thinks Fran. _One of those_. She sees Eilish sit forward a bit in her peripheral vision, waking up. “Ha ha ha,” she says. That’s how Eilish warns of danger ahead, she starts enunciating her laughs.

“No,” replies Producer Pete grimly and Fran’s inclined to feel a bit more sympathy for him than she did a few minutes ago. The light in his eyes must have died ages ago.

“So, what’s the name all about?”

“What, Crooked Usage?”

 “Yeah, I mean, _what does that mean_?” If they had known how many times a day they would be asked that, they would have just used their own names or nothing at all.

 “We met at a party in Finchley on a little road called Crooked Usage. I was obsessed with it and thought it would make a good name for something and then invented a fake band just so I could use it. But I can’t play anything or sing, so it seemed simpler to just call ourselves that.”

 “And you got on so well at this party, you thought, let’s write sketches together?”

 “Something like that.”

“We were forced into a Pictionary team together. We played by intuition alone. I would touch pen to paper and Fran would shout ‘disability pension’ right away. We were unstoppable. People began to fear us. We were shunned by the community.”

The decision about the road name really happened. So did the party. They met at a mutual friend’s flat whose name they always pretend to forget in interviews because he was such an unaccountable dickhead who just happened to throw immense parties and had a generous attitude towards sharing weed. That electric realisation that they were both mocking him, making each other die trying not to laugh, while he had no idea he was being torn apart. Later on, he’d slurred that he never thought to introduce them before because they were not the same kind of person. Fran knew what he meant right away: Eilish and her set glittered, practically glowed in the dark. Butterflies among the moths. It hadn't mattered when they were young, the differences between them dulled by fun and booze and drug-fuelled adventures that produced a thousand inside jokes and brought them impossibly closer. Close enough that they can now ad lib a complicated Pictionary origin story to derail a local radio interview because they’ve taken a shared and immediate dislike to the DJ without having to so much as look at each other.

“We could have gone all the way to the top, but we’re not stupid, we know how difficult the lives of Pictionary champions are.”

“Highest suicide rate of any profession.”

“And murder rate.”

Pete the Producer begins to exhibit signs of concern.

“So we thought we should probably write sketches about medieval villages instead.”

“Plus we’re saddled with these ridiculous names from, like, a Blitzkrieg drama. Eilish Hershel sounds like you’ve had to escape the prejudice of wartime Belfast as the love child of a Jew and an apprentice nun.”

Eilish’s voice wavers with laughter. “I don’t think they’re called apprentice nuns.”

“Maybe not.”

 “And Frances Archer is the name of a woman who’s been assigned the night shift at the munitions factory canteen, but longs to write patriotic operas.”

 “What do you mean, ‘longs to’? They’re already written.”

 “Woah, what are you guys on?” chuckles Rich and breaks the spell.

 Eilish sneers. Fran glances at the clock and replies, “It’s 8:12 a.m.”

 There are a few, maybe two and a half, seconds of dead air while Rich fumbles for a segue and gives up. “So, after all this time on tour, what, _eight months_ , do you still get on?”

 “We’re like a family, really. Fran’s like my mum.”

 Appalled, “Am I?”

 “But families fight. Do you?”

 They both answer too quickly. “No.”

 “Oh, you answer in sync. I bet that’s not the only thing that’s in sync, am I right?”

  _He wouldn’t_. This had only happened twice outright many years ago, but it gets implied often enough that they know to expect it, although perhaps not so plainly stated.

 “What do you mean?” asks Eilish quietly. They are definitely going to make him say it.

 “Is it true what they say about women who spend a lot of time in close quarters? About their...cycles?” Producer Pete looks as if he’s wished himself into another dimension.

 “Yes,” replies Fran.

 “Must be a fun week on the tour bus.”

 “Ha ha ha,” says Eilish, “very fun. But it helps us make the most of our witchcraft, you know, for our ritualistic killings.”

 “Of small-market radio DJs,” supplies Fran helpfully.

 Two more seconds of silence while he recovers.

 “On that note, thank you, girls.”

 “No, thank _you_. Dick.” says Eilish.

 “It’s Rich.”

 “Oh, I know.”

 “That was Eilish and Fran from Crooked Usage tonight at the Palladium, 8 p.m. sharp. The show’s all sold out, but they’ve left us a few tickets to give away…”

 On the way out, Fran risks a glance at Producer Pete who is beaming at them in gratifying astonishment.

 Not so Martin, who is clearly livid when they emerge into the holding room, but like everyone else, he can’t seem to unleash at Eilish. If Fran had done this, he would be systematically telling her off in his particular form of whispered shouting.

“Well, we won’t be asked back here.”

“Who cares, Martin. Where is here even?”

They both look at Eilish and say, “Buxton”.

“Martin, is the show sold out?” asks Fran. It’s a trap.

“Yes.”

“Then why are we doing an interview at 8 in the fucking morning to promote it when we only left Huddersfield at 3 and had to sleep on the coach?” Eilish wanders off, having decided long ago that it fell squarely within Fran’s purview to tell off managers.

“Because there’s still tickets available to the Roundhouse show.”

“You mean the show we added the day before yesterday?”

“Yeah.”

“And the people who have not yet bought these tickets for a show in Camden, they listen to Dick Parfitt on Ridge Radio, Buxton, do they?”

“Calm down, Fran.”

“I am calm. You only say that when you’ve made a mistake that’s fucked us over.”

Martin stalks ahead of them, shaking his head.

Eilish falls in step next to Fran, then skips past, starts walking backwards to face her, hands swinging in her coat pockets.

“That was so much fun.”

“Thanks,” Fran practically spits through teeth clenched tight.

Her eyes go wide. “What for?”

“Oh, I don’t know, for saying I was basically your mum?”

“But you _are_ basically my mum.”

“Fuck’s sake, Eil.”

Eilish stops and Fran has to follow suit to avoid a collision. “You’re better than my real mum. She’s awful.”

“Just stop talking about it.”

“Why are you getting so angry about this?” Because she hates not sleeping enough and that DJ and those bunks and the horrible meals she’s convinced are killing her and this apparently permanent tour and how old she feels and is starting to look. Because she doesn’t need to be called the mother of someone who is two years younger than her, either figuratively, literally or in song.

“I’m not. I don’t care.”

“That’s all you do now is get angry,” Eilish’s face twists with contempt and she turns the right way round and strops off after Martin.

Fran checks her phone. It's only 8:17.

 

-2- 

_Oh, yes I know, yes I know_

_You hardly think of all these things at all_

_Yes I know, yes I know_

_You’re just as simple, as simple as you seem_

 

They draw the line at two curtain calls because they’ve seen enough theatre to know how embarrassing it gets when the only people who want to keep the applause going are the actors. There’s about thirty seconds they ever get to themselves on the nights they perform and it’s now, here in the wings before they come down enough to remember and think better of it. Eilish reaches for her and Fran hugs her tightly, not moving, stooped, eyes closed, hardly breathing. The canned answers they give in interviews have started to sound like catchphrases. They don’t write together anymore or even talk much. All this time together, and somehow it’s still as if they are each alone most of the time. But this, this little piece of undivided mutual attention…

 

A hand squirms down the back of Fran’s jeans.

 

“Best one yet,” whispers the sound woman, Margaret, in her ear as she tugs Fran’s mic pack from where it had been nestled against her backside.

 

“Thanks,” mutters Fran.

 

Eilish is divesting herself of her own mic and headset; as she pulls the wire out from under her clothes, her t-shirt rides up a bit. She doesn’t look up as she smoothes it down and asks what she always does after a gig because she knows that Fran is already watching. “Fancy a Life Cry?”

 

After a few drinks over which everyone shouts and fidgets and gestures wildly to kill some of the energy the show burdens them with, Fran wipes off all her panstick, takes a shower, sorts out her hair, then puts all her makeup back on because they take so many fucking pictures. All of this unfolds in complete silence; she’s not even talking to herself, just listening to the hum of damage in her ears that lingers after gigs. Sometime she listens to it at night and it helps her drift off. Sometimes she wonders when precisely she’ll go deaf.  

 

They meet back at the stage door. Fran puts her ear to it and she hears them all quite clearly, sticking around to meet them. There are types: some overly familiar, some silent and terrified, very few coming off as they intend to. Josh and James keep their villager costumes on because they claim that no one recognizes them without and they’ve had enough of getting asked to hold phones and take pictures. They’ve decided to be too famous for that now. Fine. This however means that they stink because their little wool getups get sweated in every night and washed infrequently. Fran and Eilish stand apart from them and their stench, chatting quietly about nothing, waiting for Martin to tie up loose ends and tell them they can leave.

 

“What was that thing they were saying at the radio station?” A typically vague formulation from Eilish.

 

“What thing?”

 

“The solar thing.”

 

“Oh, in the news bit? There’s a solar storm coming, I think. Coronal mass ejection.”

 

“Fran, that sounds filthy. I bet you’ve seen some mass ejections in your day.”

 

“More than you have.”

 

“Goes without saying. I only had to see the one to decide they weren’t for me. What does it do, this coronal mass ejection? Besides get you pregnant?”

 

“I think it can cause blackouts. Knock out mobile service.”

 

“You’re fucked then.”

 

“Yeah, but it causes MDMA shortages, so you’re fucked as well.”

 

“Oh, shit.”

 

“Yeah.”

 

Then Martin appears, annoyed as if he’s been waiting for all of them and not the other way around, and Fran gives Josh and James the nod. They go first, sort of like heralds, but really they’re more like minders, getting paid to pad out the cast of villagers but also to ensure that no one drags Eilish away by her hair. Outside, in the thick of the flashes and the grabby hands, old habits kick in easily, despite the crowds getting bigger, noisier, more overwrought every time. Fran takes the right and Eilish takes the left, same as their stage positions, working systematically to accept as many handmade gifts as are proffered, sign as many programmes or anything elses (but to the strict exclusion of skin to avoid the blame for tattoos), hug as many trembling forms, and pose for as many photos as there are phones.

 

Fran reaches for the next thing being waved in her face, their Time Out cover from two months ago, the one that got the misandry set all upset because they were flanked by two well-oiled male models, orange shaved chests and waxed eyebrows, trying to lick them, while they just stared devotedly at each other. It amounted to deeply personal revenge for all the times they’d only seen women on the cover of comedy issues if they were riding some fat bloke’s thigh or looked to be climaxing from the sight of his blazer. She smiles as she takes it from a large-eyed girl with purple hair.

 

“Hi, what’s your name?”

 

“Um...um…”

 

She glances at her and notices that she’s vibrating at a very low frequency, eyes shifting as she begins to panic at her inability to speak. Fran makes a face she hopes reads as sympathetic and stoops towards her just a little to shut the rest of the pandemonium around them out.

 

“Look at how old I am. Can you tell now that I’m up close?” The girl swallows, nods uncertainly. “Good, and do you think you should be nervous about telling someone as old as I am your name? I mean, I’m not cool. I can’t be, I’m ancient. You’re cool. You have purple hair,” she glances at the small group of faces behind the girl to confirm, “and you’re the one your friends here thought should speak to us, yeah? So you’re the cool one here. And if you tell me your name, you’d really be doing me a favour.”

 

She still can’t manage eye contact, but she says “Mairead” in that accent Fran knows so well, looking pleased. She starts writing some soothing nonsense in silver marker over the dark glossy pages.

 

“Are you Irish as well? Let me get Eilish over here to sign this, too.” The girl and her little gang whimper in ecstasy.

 

Fran doesn’t spot Eilish at first, but it turns out there’s a good reason for that: she’s sitting cross-legged on the concrete, chatting blithely away to a boy so utterly in shock that he’s not even trying to answer her, just staring with a kind of catatonic worship. There are paintings that show people looking up at God like that.

 

The ones that cry and shake and hyperventilate, the ones that Fran _hates_ because no one should feel physical distress at their mere proximity, those ones are left to Eilish because she calms them and it’s nothing short of magic. Fran’s now witnessed it, say, three or four hundred times. She floats over to them, beams, they tremble, she says something like, “You know I always get texts to Relish because of autocorrect, want to see?” They nod tearfully and seconds later, they’re comfortable enough to giggle shakily at her jokes and tell her a bit about themselves and then they go back to Sixth Form in the morning certain that they’ve already lived the best day of their life.

 

Fran has now had nine years to consider Eilish’s appeal and it boils down to a few salient points. One, although she pretends it annoys her, is her appearance, some of which is her own doing, a lot of which isn’t. Eilish looks proper Irish: small, dark, elfin, cold eyes and white skin. Second, she makes all of her own and a lot of Fran’s clothing, even now. Sewing, knitting, tailoring, silk screening, etc. All of it. No training. One day she’ll turn up at soundcheck dressed as an adorable Russian revolutionary, complete with dayglo piping. After the show, she might leave the venue in only an enormous grey and yellow striped wool coat and aubergine wellies. People like to look at her. Third, how really _funny_ she is, how sharp, how quick. How perceptive. It’s almost like a superpower she chose to use for good. Fourth, the intangible, the thing that Fran cannot articulate even after all this time. Essentially, it is that Eilish, in addition to being all of these things, is extraordinary. Extraordinary and entirely unaware of it.

 

“Eil,” Fran bends down next to her, “can you come for a minute?” and holds out her hand to pull her to her feet.

 

“Sure,” and to the dazed boy, “It was very nice to meet you, Michael. And tell them you don’t want to be a dentist. Even if they shout, it’s better than being a dentist who wants to die. Bye!”

 

Fran makes introductions to the little group and keeps moving. Big, slowing minutes pass. Her wrist aches. One of them tries to touch her face and she ducks out of the way. Time to go. Drifting towards the coach, she does a few more pictures and then the door hisses open as Wojciech lets her on. She settles in her seat and does a headcount. James and Josh are still outside with Eilish. Martin is talking to his wife on the phone in low apologetic tones at the very back. Another 15 minutes go by. For the first time in a long while, she wants a cigarette, but favs some gushing tweets instead. By the time she’s made herself a mobile margarita with all the trimmings and eaten half a vile sandwich, her impatience has taken on a distinct tinge of fury. Not only does this now mean less time to sleep in an actual bed like a human being, but it makes her look bad when Eilish is out there multiplying fishes and loaves for their devotees on her own. Just as she’s about to go out and pretend to smile and whisper abuse in Eilish’s ear, the door opens and the engine starts up. Fran drops her eyes to her phone, affects an outlandishly bored expression that says _don’t_ in the clearest terms. The green velvet of Eilish’s coat whispers by, drags silken against Fran’s hand as it goes and she shivers. Right behind it, another body brushes past, jarring her elbow. Sometimes they take someone from the crew if there’s been a row or Eilish wants company. When she pushes herself up from the seat and turns to glance back, there are two people on the short curved sofa: Eilish, smirking, and a sort of second Eilish in a different colour scheme, obnoxious brights instead of jewel tones. Twin velvet coats (emerald green and royal blue), identical precise bobs (nearly black and crayon orange), carefully raccooned eyeliner (purple and black)...it’s like someone’s put an Instagram filter over her. Eilish waves. Fran drops back into her seat, anger surging red and hot all over her skin, bleeding into her vision. Wonderful. And here she had thought that the novelty of groupies had worn off.

 

A dozen miles of scraggly moor slip past. Fran turns the volume up on the podcast she’s not listening to because all she can hear is giggling coming from the back of the bus and she won’t acknowledge it, but the sound of it is burning right through Stuart Goldsmith’s idle chat with Bridget Christie. She wishes she could listen to music instead, with its layers and layers of sound, like a wall between her ears and the teenaged cooing going on behind her, but every single song has some meaning for the two of them now because they’ve spent so much time together listening to Fran’s albums on shuffle that none of it belongs to her anymore. She turns Bridget Christie up even louder, winces when the audience laughs, turn her back down, hears low murmurs and sniggering behind her, tears her headphones out of her ears, lets her head fall against the cool window, gives up. Even with her eyes squeezed shut, she can’t miss the stuttering flashes of bright blue light as the coach whines to a lurching stop.

 

“What is it, Wojciech?” she calls out.

 

“Don’t know, maybe accident.”

 

It casts a pall, that. James and Josh go quiet, put aside their game of what looks like Cards Against Humanity, rubbernecking although there’s nothing to see yet because they’re still too far away. Even the sweet nothings from the back abate. The coach inches forward, stops. A car drives past in the opposite direction, then another. Forward, stop. No one’s speaking still, except for Martin still murmuring to his wife, way in the back, past Eilish and Eilish Jr. and the bunks. They move forward again. Wojciech announces, not entirely calmly, “Is not accident, is checkpoint.”

 

Fran straightens in her seat, turns to look back. Eilish is already up and moving smoothly towards the toilet, no doubt to empty her pockets. Baby Eilish tries to catch Fran’s eye and smiles tentatively when she does. Fran does not. Christ, she’s a child. She can’t be twenty, young even by Eilish’s standards. The coach crawls forward a few feet. The blue light of the police car floods the inside of the tour bus, flashing rhythmically on the girl’s skin. _Oh shit, oh fuck_. Up the aisle, trying not to run, making a point of not responding to the spreading, hopeful grin. Standing over the girl, a little too close, Fran asks, “How old are you?”

 

Her pretty little face falls, “I can do what I want!” Not a good answer to a question when you’re expecting a numerical value. That is the answer of someone whose parents are still in a legal position to tell them what to do, who can’t vote or indeed buy the two-litre bottles of cider they chug in parks after dark.

 

“How. Old. Are. You?”

 

“Eighteen,” oh, but she’s unhappy.

 

“Show me.”

 

“Why?”

 

“Because if you’re not, you’re going to have to hide in a minute or I’m going to be in the newspaper tomorrow. So show me.”

 

With more than a passing resemblance to a martyred saint set in stained glass, she shrugs off her black patent backpack, digs through it and produces a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles wallet. She’s not old enough to have watched the show, so she knows them either from the movies or from typing ‘retro’ into Etsy. Fran feels her lip pulling up in a sneer, lets it. She gets handed a provisional driving licence. Kathryn Dills. 26 October 1996.

 

“You turned eighteen the day before yesterday.”

 

“Still did, though.”

 

“Look, Kathryn-”

 

“Kitti. K-I-T-T-I.”

 

Fran stares, makes herself glance back down at the card to stop. “Kathryn, you should know better than to get on tour buses with people who have to bin the contents of their pockets when they notice the police nearby.”     

 

Eilish reappears, flushed with, Frans thinks with distaste, what is probably exhilaration. “Talking about me?”

 

“Did you get it all?”

 

“No, I saved some for breakfast. You two having a nice chat?”

 

“Just minding her for you.” The girl’s attention keeps shifting back and forth between the two of them, her head moving like she’s a cartoon watching a tennis match.

 

“Awfully kind of you, Franny.” _There_. That’s the magic word.

 

“Just doing my duty as a decent human being. You’re not really supposed to leave children unattended like this.” And she goes back to her seat because they could go on for hours and she’s so tired and sad that she can’t pretend she isn’t anymore.

 

The bus lurches forward and stops. From the front, the sound of the door opening and boots on the four short steps up. Police, two of them, one conferring quietly with Wojciech, the other glancing at each of them in turn, but with an underlying disinterest. He doesn’t recognise them then, good. Sometimes when they do it isn’t in their favour. They assume, not incorrectly, things about drugs and dissipation. But not this one. The other straightens from speaking to their driver and doesn’t even look their way before she steps off to follow her partner back out into the night. Fran relaxes fractionally.

 

But Wojciech’s turning the coach around, away from London and the last show tomorrow, away from the Camden Roundhouse and her bed with its memory foam mattress cover and absolutely no chance of bedbugs, and that isn’t relaxing in the least. Martin hurries to the front and speaks to Wojciech in contentious-sounding murmurs, casting guilty looks back at them periodically. So it isn’t good news then. That’s reinforced by how he drags himself back up the aisle, not looking at them, like a child who’s about to take some sort of old-fashioned punishment. It’s as if they beat him for Christ’s sake.

 

“What?” prompts Fran when he doesn’t speak at first.

 

“They’ve closed the A6 because of the storm coming.”

 

“What storm, the solar storm?” That from Eilish because she learned something new today.

 

“No, there’s some big coastal storm coming, they say it’s dangerous, people need to stay indoors and all that.”

 

“They’re only doing that because they underplayed it in 1987 and people died and they don’t want to look bad,” says Fran glumly.

 

“What happened in _1987_?” asks Kitti, as if 1987 is a hilariously outmoded concept like fax machines.

 

“Eil, your baby is fussing.” Kitti giggles. So few people actually do that, stoop to _giggling_. She’s probably one of these bulletproof girls who has so much self-confidence from posting makeup tutorials on YouTube that she can’t quite imagine that anyone would feel anything less than worship for her. All slights taken as quips. It’s at least twice as annoying as a result. Fran sighs, closes her eyes. “So we’re detouring?”

 

“Yes and no.”

 

“Martin.”

 

“We have to turn around, but we’re not getting on another road because apparently they’re closing all of them. There’s a hotel some way back by Dark Peak and that’s where we’re headed for the night.”

 

“It’s not even raining.” Of course that’s when the first smattering starts pelting the bus, providing an accurate and apparently amusing metaphor for Fran’s entire life, at least according to the little huff of laughter Eilish fails to hold in. Martin goes back to his seat, James and Josh pick up their cards, no one says anything and Fran’s pressing her face against the cold glass being hammered by the sudden downpour so she can feel anything else but the lump expanding in her throat. She just wants to go home and sleep for a week. That’s one night further away now, but it might as well be a thousand years.

 

Flipping idly through new podcasts, none of them appeals until she hears a familiar tread up the aisle and she panics and presses play on anything to look busy. It’s Melvyn Bragg about something boring, one of the episodes she’d skipped before. Eilish drops into the seat next to her, spreading out and crowding her until she’s almost completely completely wedged against the window.

 

Fran ignores the tap on the shoulder. Undeterred, she tugs on Fran’s headphones until they each pop out, one by one. Staring hard out the window, she can’t see her, but from the bounce of her voice, it sounds as though she’s looking straight ahead. “Sooooooo, you’re furious at me.”

 

“And I don’t know why.”

 

No reply.

 

Eilish drops her voice low, kindling memories, and when it comes out, it’s more air than sound. “ _Franny_.”

 

She can’t help it, it’s like she’s a trained seal for that name, a fucking circus poodle. It’s a password, a command. She darts a reluctant glance over at Eilish. That’s taken as encouragement.

 

“Tell me what I did so I can fix it.”

 

All of a sudden, Fran breaks, just like the storm, not there one moment and raging the next, whispering fiercely. “What the fuck are you doing going after a child like that? What’s wrong with you?”

 

Eilish just stares, sullen but excited.

 

“Well? Tell me because I don't know what you're doing anymore.”

 

“Well, Fran, when a woman and a woman love each other very much-“

 

“Yeah, I get it. But why this kid? A fan, for fuck’s sake. She looks exactly like you. This is all going to go up on Tumblr. You can roll your eyes at me if you want, but you should be much more afraid of the internet than you are. Those girls are fucking crazy and they will tear you apart if you get off with this one and then drop her. You know that, don’t you?”

 

“I didn’t think-“

 

“But that’s exactly the problem, Eilish!” Fran gets too loud and Josh turns to look in their direction. More quietly, staring down at her feet, “You _don’t_ think. You hardly think about these things at all. I’m the one who has to worry all the time and I suspect that you’re completely unaware of it. Life’s so simple for you, isn’t it? It just falls into place around you.”

 

“Fran, what are we even talking about anymore?”

 

“Anyone else, you could have picked anyone else.”

 

Eilish’s head turns so slowly towards her that it comes across all sinister. She’s quite relieved she isn’t facing her. “Like who?”

 

It creeps unbidden into her mind and she's sure she'll give it away with the look on her face. So she does something insane, a kind of misdirection in hopes that Eilish will shut up and get up and go back to her seat in frustration. Fran fishes her sunglasses out of her coat pocket and puts them on, shifts bodily towards the window as much as she can, an attempt at body language so unmistakable that it’s more like screaming. It works. “You’re going mad,” Eilish whispers to her eventually and leaves.

 

-3- 

_I looked at my phone because it keeps me company_

 

It turns out that despite the storm, or maybe because of it, the sky stays steeped in that strange half-darkness of false night you see from time to time. They’re winding back through parkland, towards the north end of the district and Dark Peak. Even if the mountains are too old to be jagged or steep, Fran feels the pressure of their gentle ascent through the hills in her ears and forces a yawn to pop them. Outside, moors and the odd contorted tree slip by, picked out in black and bruised purple against the bright navy sky. Eilish will be feeling all of the smooth dips and rises of the coach in her stomach. She feels everything more. Kitti would probably love to hold the smooth ends of her bob in a tight little bristly tail at the nape of her neck while she pukes her guts out. Fran has seen Eilish cry, bleed, throw up and pass out, more than most get in a lifetime from someone else. She’s seen her...Groping hastily in her coat pocket for her phone, she eases it out, wipes her palm on her jeans before swiping through to her contacts list. 

 

She tries Cam again. That’s three unreturned calls and more texts that she can bear to count. He’s received all of them, under each blue bubble is the word “read”, so he’s not dead or anything. (Eilish, a long time ago: “What is Cameron even for?”)

 

If someone were to write a book about her life, this would be a meaningful vignette:

 

On a four-night stop back in London, almost a month ago now, Fran’s in the toilet with the door open, taking advantage of the bright mid-morning light slicing in through the window behind her to sort out her eyebrows. She has missed this, getting ready in a bathroom with light that isn’t yellow and buzzing, where she doesn’t have to perch on the counter or wedge as much as herself as she can in the sink to get close to the mirror. From the room a few feet away comes the steady din of machine-gun fire, punctuated by a bigger explosion here and there, grenades most likely. When she can’t hear herself humming Hood anymore, she calls out, “Can you turn it down a bit, please?”

 

The sound of guns fades slightly. She specified a bit, so she gets a bit.    

 

“Oh, I forgot to ask you, how was the dentist?” She waits, eyeliner poised; it does no good to talk while she’s trying to get her flicks right. “Cam?”

 

“What?”

 

“How was the dentist?”

 

“Alright.”

 

Fran drags the pen in one smooth line against her eyelashes. “Did you have any cavities?”

 

“Yeah.”

 

She touches a q-tip to her tongue, starts cleaning up the line, although it’s not bad. “When do you have to go back?”

 

“Dunno.”

 

“Can you check?”

 

The sputtering sound of AKs cuts off abruptly, then a long-suffering sigh, the particular click a phone makes when it’s being consulted. “Fourteenth.”

 

“Isn’t that your sister’s birthday?”

 

“Maybe.”

 

“You should find out because she’s still annoyed about last year.”

 

“Fine.”

 

“Cam.”

 

“I said, alright!”

 

Fran opens her mouth, snaps it shut on an admonishment about his tone. It had always seemed to her that when people said that something ‘hit’ them, they were somewhat overstating it. Maybe their stomach gave a lurch or flipped or some other kind of quick pang like that, but nothing so violent as a blow. Now she knows better, though. Because at that precise moment, a thought, a realisation of sorts, hits her so hard she’s winded, sharp and upending as it is: that anyone on the outside of this conversation, a casual observer or an audience standing behind her, watching the mascara wand clamped tightly and wavering in her eyeline, would have no choice but to think she was speaking to a child, not the man she lives with, gets photographed with sometimes when she goes to the wrong Starbucks or comes home from a party. And that nearly all of their conversations go something like this, except for the more intimate ones, thank god. It is a sudden insight so fundamentally bewildering that she can’t help make a joke of it later. When Bruce Dessau (who should know better) interviews her and Eilish for a thing in Chortle and asks, as too many people feel the right to these days, when she is going to have a kid, she reminds him of the video game journalist she has at home. “It’s like I already have one,” she laughs. Then Cam reads it and stops talking to her for the three remaining days she has at home, which really only serves to prove her point, really.

 

_-4-_

_The timing’s fantastic_

_For lovers to mean what they say_

 

They stand, colourful and dripping, in the ancient hotel lobby while Martin sorts out rooms with an unsmiling grey-faced employee with no name tag or discernible charm. People have aligned themselves in the usual camps: Josh and James together, so much so that people have started writing pornography about them on the internet, Wojciech somewhere near Martin because he seems frightened or disgusted by the rest of them, Fran isn’t sure which yet, and Eilish, usually treading small circuits in front of her, chattering, nervous, in a good mood. Not this time, though. Right now, she has her eyes closed and her chin tipped up at the ceiling, folded sideways into a lumpy velvet armchair, her knees bent over the arm and the heels of her boots bouncing idly against the side of it. _Everything_ in the hotel is covered in velvet in various states of threadbaredness, worn and the colour of nothing. Fran hopes that she and her baby disciple will cling to every surface in the skin-crawling way velvet has of snagging against itself. Eilish catches her small petty smile at the thought before she can look away.

 

If she were in a better mood, this hotel might have proven a bit hilarious. Beyond the upholstery and the put-upon skeleton staff, there are _knights in armour_ in the corridor and her room has an actual key, a warded-lock one that she has to give back if she wants to go outside. It bangs heavily into her leg through the thin satin lining of her coat pocket as she hurries down the hallway to get to her room before the others because she doesn’t want to engage with anyone anymore for at least eight hours. Or rather seven and counting, checking her phone to see that it’s just gone past two o’clock. Part of her knows she’s being horrible to everyone, but she can’t help it at the moment. Exile is the only solution.

 

Shouldering the door open and easing her coat off to drop on the only un-upholstered surface in the vicinity, it takes precisely five seconds to ascertain that there is no mini-fridge and therefore no mini-bar and thus no drink mix and ergo no simple pleasures to be had in here. She hoists her bag up onto the dresser, dark wood polished nearly black over the years, and settles it next to her coat, but a bit of rummaging does not turn up her bus vodka. So, she has either finished it and doesn’t remember, in which case she’s further gone than she thinks and will have to work on that, or Eilish has taken it, as she sometimes does when she forgets what shops are and mistakes Fran for one. The bed squeaks when she sits down on the very edge of it, pulls her bun loose, lets her hair fall into her face, slightly damp like everything else she has on. She thinks about crying, she _might_ cry, comes very close to it, but settles on a few slow breaths of utter misery in and out. In the hall, chipper, indistinct voices chatter and laugh about something, gradually becoming recognisable as Eilish and the groupie. Fran’s not quite paranoid enough (yet) to think that they’re talking about her, but their happiness feels like a slight in and of itself. And she bets they have her fucking vodka. When the door, the one right across from hers by the sounds of it, closes on their voices, Fran changes as quickly as she can, shivering into a thin t-shirt she loves and some grey skinnies, and she’s out the door, pulling on her shoes and trying to walk at the same time.

 

Downstairs, there is no sign of the man who checked them all in or of anyone else for that matter. It’s impressive on its own, all this warm, dim light and darkest red velvet and gleaming old wood - it might be the setting for an episode of Poirot or a good horror movie, the kind they don’t make anymore because everyone seems to prefer dismemberment and mouths stitched to arses to ghosts. To one side of the reception area is a pitch-dark hallway that gives onto a huge dining area, the walls vaulting double-height from the black and white chequered floor up to a skylight showing the bluest of nights through the storm. Across the room, past far more tables than this place must need these days, two pairs of French doors shudder resolutely against the wind, now just threatening to howl. Fran turns back and heads the other way.

 

In that direction, beyond a still-silent lobby, an empty bar, mercifully free of writing partners or managers, but also, more problematically, of staff. At this point, Fran is undeterred by the small social niceties she would normally insist on observing, like waiting to be served or paying for things. “Hello?” she calls once and nothing happens, except that the lights flicker ominously as the wind gusts to shrieking outside. She climbs onto a bar stool and sits, fidgeting, jiggling her leg, scanning the endless array of mocking alcohol behind the counter, properly old and ridiculous stuff she would order if she could stand the sight of Eilish at the moment. They’ve done this before on tour, gotten hammered on Curacao or Advocaat or memorably for all the green vomit it generated, Izarra. “Hello?” Still nothing, except howling wind. “ _Fuck it_.”

 

Fran lets herself behind the bar by the low swinging door and works quickly, still afraid to be caught out and shouted at because she’s that kind of person, mixing a lot of vodka with a little bar lime and some ice she has to hack at to get free. Back on her stool, she can pretend a passing employee made her the drink and disappeared, even though it’s nearly 2:30 in the morning and clearly no one works here.              

 

“There you are!” Fran nearly falls off her stool, clutches at the bar so she won’t, jolts her drink and then catches it just as  it begins to tip over. An ice cube falls out and skitters along the entire length of the bar. “Sorry, did I give you a fright?”

 

Fran’s heart makes up for stopping by racing. She remembers how to breathe. “Oh, it’s you. Shouldn’t you be fulfilling Eilish’s lifelong dream of fucking herself right now?”

 

Kitti has the decency to stare at her shoes, blush. “No, she kicked me out to take a shower.”

 

“I’m surprised you didn’t take that as the invitation it was intended to be.”

 

“She really meant it.” She hoists herself up and slides across the bar stools until she’s perched on the one next to Fran. Because she’s so tiny, her legs dangle, her toes not reaching the foot bar, until she tucks one foot under the other, shuffles around so that her knee is pressing against Fran’s thigh.

 

“You’re my favourite, you know that?” Ha. _Of course_. There exists a type of girl that prefers Fran. This one is not that type.

 

“Oh and did you mention that to Eilish at all?”

 

“Yeah, I did actually, I said, it’s Frances that I like, you know, that I _fancy_ , just like that. And you know what she said?”

 

“What?”

 

“She said, me too.”

 

She tries not to give away what her stomach has just done. “Mmmm.”

 

“Is it true then?”

 

“Is what true?”

 

“You and her. Are you in love?”

 

Fran laughs once, almost silently, just a puff of air with the barest hint of sound. “No, that’s just the slash fic.”

 

“Oh.” She sounds disappointed. Good. “Hey, what happened to the pink bits in your hair?”

 

“It washes out. It’s just chalk.”

 

“But...but why?”

 

“For work.”

 

“This is your work. It’s your job to be cool,” _Oh, good LORD_ , “so what does it matter if you have a bit of pink hair?”

 

“I have to look versatile. For acting jobs.”

 

“What acting jobs?”

 

“Crooked Usage isn’t going to last forever and you only get to audition for a certain type of role at my age with pink hair.”

 

Suddenly and alarming tearful, “Why are you saying that?”

 

“Well, I’m 37, as you should know if I’m your favourite, and that means that if I keep dyeing my hair funny colours, the only roles I’ll get are ‘prostitute’ or ‘murdered prostitute’.”

 

“No, I meant why wouldn’t CU last forever?”

 

“Do I have to explain time to you?” That sounds rather harsher than she’d intended, but Kitti is undeterred. Hate just bounces off her.

 

“But you can keep doing it for a while longer. You’ve not fallen out? Some people say that you have. You haven’t though, have you?”

 

“We can’t keep pretending to be peasants in neon rags. You’ll all get bored, you’ll see. I know you don’t think you will and that’s nice, but you will in the end. This won’t last. Eilish has...everything that Eilish does. But I’m only good at writing or pretending, so I try to get serious acting jobs so I can pay for my house because writing doesn’t really cover it.” That’s what it boils down to really: if Fran is a comedy writer, Eilish is an artist. She doesn’t need a backup plan, she never has. She’ll always rise to the top of whatever she’s doing and everyone will love her for doing it so well because she does. She is good at everything that way. Those people that don’t like her just can’t get used to the breeze of concepts wooshing over their heads. Fran accepted that she was the minor talent about a thousand years ago, but that means she needs to plan to scale. Medium ambitions for medium ability.

 

“Serious acting?! We’re not good enough for you?”

 

“No, you’re not steadfast enough for me.”

 

“I don’t know what that means.”

 

“It means not fickle.”

 

“We all love you so much and you’re looking for the first opportunity to give up and be in fucking yogurt adverts?”

 

“You don’t _love_ me though, do you. You don’t know me. I know it feels like...Because you watch us and you talk about us like an inside joke, like a secret that only a few people know, people, you lot, you think that we belong to you a little bit. And I understand that. Our characters do belong to you in a way, not that you thought them up first, but they do in a sense because we made them for you. But I, me personally as an individual, do _not_ belong to you, not in the least. So what I do with my hair and how much time I spend with Eilish and my face and my time and my future, that does not belong to you. That’s mine.” She snarls the last word.

 

There’s no such thing as silence with the storm tearing at the moors outside, but this comes very close, airless and fraught, neither of them breathing.

 

“You know what you are?” Kitti hops off the stool, wobbles on her ankles when her breakneck shoes hit the ground.

 

“Please tell me.”

 

“You’re a bitch.”

 

“I know.” She does.

 

“You’re nothing but a nasty bitch and you’re boring as well, you don’t even belong in CU, I can’t believe you had anything to do with it.”

 

“Nor can I sometimes.”

 

“I _loved_ you-”

 

“We talked about that already and-”

 

“I _did_ though, I properly loved you and now I realize that you’re just an ungrateful boring old middle-aged woman with,” and clearly this is the most disillusioning part because of the face she makes when she spits it out, “ _brown_ hair!” And then she’s hurrying away, almost the image of Eilish’s earlier strop, except in complimentary colours and ridiculous heels.

 

“It is _light_ brown,” Fran says to herself, to be fair.

 

 -5-

_What, what, what if it was simple_

_Like the falling rain_

 

Fran retreats back to her room with a bottle each of vodka and lime cordial and two stacked glasses, one of which is filled with ice. There’s £40 sitting on the bar for the first person who notices. The flickering of the lights annoys her, creates some vague caveman unease in the back of her mind. Light should be reliably there or not at all. She turns them off. The thought of washing her face has her nearly in tears, she is that exhausted, so she gives up on this whole day and herself, and slips under the covers by phone light, legs churning gently to warm up the cool sheets. The wind carrying on outside will keep her up, tired as she is, so she reaches across to her bags on the nightstand and extricates her headphones from a tangle of keys and pens. Knowing the sad irony of it, some sort comment of modern life that a dickhead would gleefully satirise if given the idea, she selects rain sounds from her music list to drown out the real storm outside. Lightning flashes sharply through the window, brighter than she remembers it can get. Even now, more than twenty years out of childhood, coming thunderstorms bring that prickle of excitement, of very delicate panic, almost as if the electricity crashing down from the sky was contagious.

 

Instagram won’t load because her service switched to GPRS a while ago. The lightning makes it past her closed eyelids. She almost gives in to the feeling that something is wrong because it’s too brilliant, nearly blue and blinding. And there hasn’t been any thunder yet. The rain in her headphones fades to let the chime of a text come through. Fran doesn’t open her eyes because she knows who sent it and can guess what it says. Normal people are asleep now and it’s plausible that she is as well; she’ll swear she was if she gets called on it tomorrow. The hissing of the fake rain resumes only to be interrupted three more times in quick succession. Fran feels for the switch on the side of her phone, sets it to silent. Immediately, another one buzzes through. If she could, she would dismiss the messages with her eyes closed because they are going to keep announcing that they’re waiting to be read every minute or so, just as annoying as the person who sent them. Fran takes careful note of her movements when she squints at the screen so she can do it without looking next time.

 

Today 3:14 AM

 

_Are you still mad at me?_

 

_Fran come tell me a story._

 

_Come play._

     

_She’s not here._

 

The door to her room is unlocked, swings silently open. She’s sitting cross-legged on her bed, funnelling glitter into balloons to blow up and pop on stage tomorrow. If tomorrow happens, if they get to London in time. The prop hands refuse to do fussy meticulous tasks like this, particularly for something meant to break. They can’t quite accept a waste of time like that. But Eilish likes the way it looks when the glitter goes flying in every direction and then floats idly down to cover everything and everyone beneath. The glitter will get _everywhere_. The sheets will be a mess. The hotel staff will have to be tipped so generously it’ll amount to a bribe. It will glint in Eilish’s hair when the sunlight flashes through the procession of tree branches speeding past the coach. It will stick to her hands, get under her fingernails and rip her cuticles to shreds. Fran will find it in her own eyes, her ears, her mouth. When she dies, hopefully in the distant future, and they open her up, there will be glitter in her stomach, in her lungs, in her heart.

 

“What do you want?”

 

“Oh, hi!” Sunny and bright as a summer holiday.

 

“What did you want?”

 

“Nothing, just...what were you doing?”

 

“Eilish, I was in bed.”

 

“I wanted to talk to you. I don’t get to talk to you anymore, even though we’re together all the time.”

 

“Can’t it wait?”

 

“Yeah, but why should it?”

 

Fran takes a step forward, another. Eilish just sits there, back straight and smiling with half her mouth. She's wearing small Sex-Pistols pink y-fronts and a nothing top, sheer black jersey with rolled-up sleeves. She has about a dozen of these in different colours that she likes to wear out and about because she’s deeply attached to her 90’s Northern Ireland mindset that visible bras are shocking. Fran swears to god that those people were borderline feral until about five years ago. So she's wearing one of those, but at some point, she took off her bra and didn't care to put it back on when she texted Fran over.

 

“Why are you tormenting me?” She’s gotten closer to bed without meaning to.

 

“How am I doing that?” The lopsidedness of her smile spreads, grows more pronounced. Lightning illuminates it, freezes it in time. Always looking at her like she knows, indulgently. Forever indulged.

 

“Stop smirking at me!” Fran goes from quiet, threadbare calm to instant fury, entirely out of proportion to the situation at hand, she knows, but Eilish should have heeded her stillness for the threat it was. “That look on your face all the time like you know what I’m thinking.”

 

“It’s because I know what we’re both thinking.” That’s when the power cuts out and everything goes dark. A second or two before lightning flashes searchingly around the room, showing Eilish looking up at her avidly, waiting for something inevitable to happen.

 

Fran covers her eyes. “What did you want?” she asks again, softly.

 

“Nothing, it’s just that you seem to be going a bit mental.”

 

“I don’t think anyone’s ever been this tired before.”

 

“I think they probably have.”

 

“Mmmh.”

 

“Franny, you need to sleep.”

 

 _Now_. It won’t ever get quite this bad again, she’ll never feel more like she’s on a cliffside, there won’t be a good time nor even a better one. _Do it now_.

 

“I can’t do this anymore.”

 

Fran peeks through her fingers, dreading and hoping the blow will land square. Pure light strobes on Eilish’s face, contorted one second and placid the next.

 

“Right. Is that just Usage or does it apply to me, too?”

 

“I just can’t.”

 

“Not with me.” Fran should say something, should protest, but doesn’t. Can’t. “You hate me.”

 

“I don’t hate you. I wish I did, it would make it easier.”

 

“You wish you hated me.”

 

“No, I don’t, not really. I just- Eil, I’m tired.”

 

“So sleep.”

 

Fran shakes her head, looks away. “More tired than that.”

 

“If you do hate me, it’s okay. I mean, it’s something. I tried to make you feel that way, a bit. Because I think you used to love me a little and then you stopped and I tried to make it so that when you looked at me, you felt _something_.” That all tumbles out in a whisper barely heard above the frenzy of wind and rain outside. The smirk is gone.

 

“I did. I do.” There is safety in distance, so she retreats a step, then two from the bed. “I don’t hate you. I hate how you make me feel sometimes.”

 

“How do I make you feel?”

 

_It’s every feeling, all of them, piled on top of each other in a teeming heap that’s heavy like drowning on some days and easy-peasy like a kind of mundane perfection on others. It’s horrible and it’s all she can think about and she doesn’t even know who she’ll be when it’s gone._

 

“Everything at once.”

 

“Why is that bad?”

 

“Because it’s unbearable.”

 

“But what if it wasn’t? What if it was just simpler to let it be okay?”

 

“It can’t.”

 

“Fran-”

 

“Eilish,” the howling stops, the wind dies, almost as if it’s paused to listen. Fran shifts her eyes away from the expectant face, uncomfortable with the scrutiny. She’s back at the bedside somehow, her shins pressing against the cold comfort of the brass frame. You get used to the hyperbole of fame ( _I can’t breathe I’m obsessed with you I’m fainting I’m dying I’m dead I love you_ ) so that when the time comes, you’re not sure which words to use. “Eilish,” she tries again, “I-”

 

But she’s not looking remotely in Fran’s direction. “Someone just walked by the window,” she says.

 

Fran blinks, takes a few breaths to recover, to get angry. “Stop fucking around.”

 

“As if I’d interrupt this! I _swear_ , someone walked by.”

 

“We’re on the second floor.”

 

“I know.”

 

Fran follows her horrified expression, stares out the window for an stifling half-minute, watching lightning pick out the thrashing branches of a tree, the endless rolling moors, Dark Peak far away, the pitted surface of the gravel drive, the coach parked up nearby. Only that, no person out for an impossible stroll by a second-floor window. In fact, the only thing Fran _can_ see is the falling face of a blithely lying Irish miscreant whom she’ll only have to see for one more day of her life. One day more. It’s all she can do to keep from fucking _singing_.

 

“Well, I’m off.”

 

Eilish gets on her hands and knees, crawls to the edge of the bed to catch Fran’s wrist, misses, and nearly falls off carried by her own momentum. “Fran, I _swear_. Fran, please. Franc-”

 

The door slams shut on the end of her name. And she feels her way across the corridor, back to her room and her grubby little dreams.

 

 -6-

_Before two simple fish that learned to cry_

_Got suspicious of their love and asked each other why_

 

It did happen once, years ago. Okay, not once. But for a few weeks, adding up to one...what? A sort of secret affair, although that sounds a lot more serious than it felt at the time and a lot less meaningful than it turned out to be.

 

Eilish’s flatmate, whom she could afford to do without at that point, worked during the day because she was a civilian and spent weekends at her boyfriend’s. They had the run of the place, hysterically ploughing through the writing of their third and hopefully last Edinburgh show. Every day that week, Eilish wore less and less when she answered the door as the temperature soared. So did Fran. She would turn up fully dressed from the tube and immediately take half her clothes off. On a Sunday afternoon, they got so bored and hot that they made a unique punch from whatever they could find in the kitchen and got hammered in front of two fans, drinking mainly because of the ice. Then they smoked a bit of weed and lots of cigarettes.

 

Eilish pinched her paper-thin vest, this artful thing of mint green, and flapped it up and down to move the sticky air pressing down on her skin. Fran glanced over at her, her tiny ruffled hotpants, like grey bloomers but very short, flicked her eyes back towards the RSPCA calendar on the wall across the room. The page was on April, they hadn’t turned it in ages, and there was a nice white bunny there with some too-small to read script under it. It probably said something like, ‘Rabbits are nice, but don’t buy them for Easter. They are pets just like cats and dogs and require serious and devoted care.’ _Don’t make them look so cute then_ , Fran thought. Then, _I might get a rabbit on the way home_. Sweaty figures crept tentatively into her slack palm, worked their way between her own, stayed clasped there like a question.  “I’m so high right now,” Fran said, out loud.    

 

Just when it was still light to see, Eilish slid her palms up Fran’s cheeks, kneeling next to her on the sofa, looking down into her face with such intensity that Fran closed her eyes.

 

“Franny,” she said against her mouth, “Do you want to?” That was the first time she called her that.

 

She nodded, eyes still shut tight, made a noise. It meant _yes of course I always please._ It wasn’t that she wouldn’t talk, it was that she couldn’t.

 

One hand slid to her neck, dragging against her clammy skin, fingers loosely circling her throat, but thumb pressing at the hollow there. “Franny,” Eilish took a breath between each word, quick and shaky, “you have to say yes or I won’t.”

 

“Yes, please.”

 

Later, when Eilish felt the faint tremor of dread in Fran’s legs, she slid back up her body and whispered to her, kissed her until she wasn’t scared anymore, just desperate with want. And right away, it was life-altering like that, because one day you could look at someone and your throat would ache at how remarkable they were, and the next, they were between your legs and you couldn’t remember your own name.

 

Little felt unfamiliar because she already knew Eilish so well, knew how soft her hair and skin felt, how they smelled, what she looked like with no clothes on, her moods, everything. Then there was watching her writhe and seeing her eyes roll back in her head, different angles, a new and particular range of sounds, hearing _Franny_ in needy whispers. That was all unprecedented.

 

On the eighth day, between the increasingly long and life-affirming breaks they took from writing, Eilish got a call that she answered in another room. Fran pretended as hard as she could, with every last atom of her acting skill, that she did not care in the least about this. Eilish came back after a few minutes, stretched out on one end of the sofa, wove her legs with Fran’s, smiled.

 

“Who was that?” Fran blurted out the question with none of the nonchalance she intended. Eilish’s smile went lopsided.

 

“That girl, Rava, from the party.”

 

Oh yes, _the party_. The party a month ago at which Fran also failed at pretending not to care as an implausibly gorgeous young specimen followed Eilish everywhere and eventually into a room behind a closed door that meant Fran couldn’t go too. 

 

“You meeting up then?”

 

“Uh no, we’re not.” She made a face like Fran was patently stupid.

 

“Why’s that then?”

 

“Because of this?” gesturing at the jumble of their legs between them.

 

“Oh, right.” Rava was a witches’ brew of humanity, one of those people who is so objectively stunning that it turns literal heads, causes distraction, starts arguments between couples, causes one half of a double act to experience the purest, keenest stab of jealousy of its entire life. Half-Siberian and half-Korean, vaguely Asian facial features, but with looooong shiny red hair, not dyed, lightest olive skin and implausible green eyes. And on top of all that, she proved perfectly kind and talented. A ballet dancer, for Christ’s sake. It was as preposterous and dazzling as magic. Fran wanted her dead.     

 

“You didn’t think I would keep getting off with other people, did you?”

 

“Well, I didn’t know...I thought...I didn’t know if you meant it.”

 

She was on her the next second, knees on either side of Fran’s thighs, hands tilting her face up, angling it so she could look down at her, which seemed to be her new favourite thing to do. Well, one of a list of about five or so. Suddenly unsmiling, “I meant it.” When she started kissing her, Fran forgot to worry.

 

The fling, affair, love story, whatever it was, never left Eilish’s flat.

 

“I need to go home and get clothes.”

 

“Just borrow mine.”

 

“Your shirts are too short.”

 

“They look good on you.”

 

“No, they don’t. They look too short.”

 

“Why even bother? We only take them off anyway.”

 

When they went up to the Heath to have a celebratory picnic with their comedian friends for having (somehow) finished writing the show with a weekend to spare, Fran consigned herself to the margins of conversations, talking to other people far away from Eilish. A corkscrew slipped in her grip as she tried to open some nearly-frozen pink wine and scratched the inside of her wrist jaggedly. She sucked air in through her teeth as the little beads of blood welled along the scratch. Eilish appeared then at her side, holding her wrist with cool fingers and bringing it to her mouth. She kissed the scratch, looked up at Fran, darkest grey eyes suddenly warm and bright, and ran the tip of her tongue across the tiny blooms of blood, said, “ _There_ ”. Fran just watched horrified, swallowed. Then one of their friends, Allie, whom Martin would later marry and perpetually apologize to, shrieked with laughter about something and Fran woke up and snatched her hand away. Looking around, it didn’t seem like anyone had noticed, but it wasn’t as if they would say if they had. No one looked scandalised anyway.  

 

That night, in bed, very late because they had both learned to slow down and take their time, make the most of it, Eilish flipped over on her back and tucked a hand behind her head, the other occupied elsewhere. “We should tell people.”

 

“Tell them what?” She knew what.

 

“That we’re together now,” she murmured, sounding sleepy.  

 

Fran didn’t answer. Eilish’s hand went slack against her neck, slipped off entirely. It was easier to think when she wasn’t touching her. This sudden impetus to tell people alarmed her. Opting for Fran instead of the category of person that Rava belonged to bordered on mental illness. It boiled down to how horrible it would be when it was over. This would not last. Eilish would meet someone more suited to her, magnetic and stupidly beautiful and happy, and she would realise. It was the thought of telling everyone, their friends, the press, and worse still, her parents, the thought of telling all of those people this thing about herself that they can’t have guessed because she certainly didn’t, and then having to slink back to heterosexuality in defeat when it was all over. Fran did not sleep that night, not for a minute. She only stopped staring at the ceiling to pretend to doze when Eilish woke up and slid out of bed quietly to make coffee that she left for her on the bedside table. Eilish didn’t even drink coffee, had started buying it just for her.

 

“I’m going to text Martin and tell him.”

 

“That won’t be necessary.”

 

“Why, did you already tell him?”

 

Fran put the coffee down on the kitchen counter. Eilish should have noticed that she had put her shoes on for no good reason. “No, it just...won’t be necessary,” her voice shook.

 

“Why are you talking like a bank teller?”

 

“This isn’t going to work.”

 

Eilish sat back on her heels on the sofa, looked at her bemused. “What, me and you? We’re the only thing that does work.”

 

“Not like this.”

 

Her mystified little smile faded. “Oh, I see and how many times have you come in the last week, Fran?”

 

Fran cut her eyes away, running her tongue across the edge of her teeth, her skin crawling with exquisite embarrassment. “That’s not the point.”

 

“Isn’t it, though? Aren’t you...don’t you like it?” She started changing colours then, red to white and back again.

 

“I can’t.”

 

“I don’t believe you.” Her tone swung from hope to anger and disbelief to match her skin, sometimes all in the same sentence. Fran could not begrudge her her confusion.

 

“I don’t know what to say but I’m sorry and I can’t.”

 

She scrambled to the end of the sofa, kneeling with her hands gripping the arm, making deep gouges in the filling. “Please, Franny. We don’t have to tell anyone. I promise, it can be a secret. Is that why, you don’t want to tell anyone? It’s alright, we don’t have to. I’ll pretend that’s it’s like it always was, I’ll wait for you to want other people to know, I’ll-”

 

“Stop it, Eilish, for Christ’s sake! Stop _begging_. I’m sorry, I just can’t.”

 

There were a few seconds of household noise. The fridge running, birdsong through the open windows. Then, “Is it the idea of being with a girl? Because it’s not your stupid fucking eighteenth century anymore, it’s allowed now, people won’t burn you at the stake.” _Her_ eighteenth century? It was the nineteenth she liked anyway.

 

And Fran had grasped in desperation for a reply and the worst part of her had supplied it. She said the only thing then that could get Eilish to stop carrying on and looking at her like that, a thing so horrible, she didn’t know she was capable of it. “It’s not being with a girl, it’s being with you.” 

 

All of the fight seeped out of Eilish instantly, her shoulders fell and her head reeled to the side as if she’d been slapped.

 

Fran stood there, miserable, guilty, wanting to put her back together, but knowing she didn’t have half the courage she needed to help either of them. Outside, in the garden, the morning light fell golden on the leaves of the poplar tree that cast more shade than anyone ever needed. Gazing at that small piece of beauty meant not having to look at the crime scene at her feet, not feeling like she was holding a knife, even if she still felt the slick of blood on her hands. Knowing already that it would never wash away. Eilish, her face hidden by her hair and the angle of her neck, breathed rapidly.

 

“I’m just going to-” and Fran dragged her bag behind her, out the door and into the street, away from what she’d done.

 

Three days later, Eilish’s housemate called to say she couldn’t get her out of bed. People don’t phone anymore unless something’s really wrong and it made her afraid to answer.

 

“Come help me.”

 

“She won’t want me.”

 

“You’re the only one who can get her up.”

 

“You don’t understand, we had a fight.”

 

“She’s asking for you.”

 

So Fran hung up and held the cold glass screen of the phone against her chest for a minute or two, just breathing, eyes open. And then she got out of bed for the first time in three days herself.

 

After that, Eilish’s promiscuity grew broader. Rava came and went several times over the years, always looking like she knew not to get comfortable. There were incursions made by those representatives of humanity that Eilish had once claimed were worthless because they created nothing, famous only for their eyeliner. She fell out of private clubs into the gutter with these people just before dawn, even though she and Fran had vowed over egg nog and enormous joints one night that they would never accept membership to one of these places, just like they would turn down an OBE. All these promises made to each other about what they would never be, broken by an uninterrupted string of parties and an expansion of her chemical repertoire. Fran watched this meltdown, watched Eilish get swept away by it, watched disgusting human rubbish paw at her and throw their heads back and cackle too hard and too loud whenever she opened her mouth, watched her lose her friends and her bearings, and remained silent throughout because really, what right did she have to say anything at all? Things stayed largely the same between them except that Eilish started to smirk a lot more than she had and besides the minute after shows when they both forgot, she never, ever touched Fran if she could help it.

 

-7- 

_It’s a long life, a long life to be always longing_

 

Back in her room, staring unblinking out the window, letting the neverending lightning sear her retinas, Fran isn’t sure that she can actually make it one more day. The whole tour has lasted ten thousand years, minutes stretched to hours when you can spend that long looking at someone tucking their hair behind their ear or eating a peach. When your world narrows to a collection of gestures and sounds played back to you nightly by your traitorous brain. There is too much time in which to love like this. Because life isn’t short at all. It’s long, very long when you want something and you don’t have it. And it’s even longer when you know what that thing is and it’s right in front of you, everyday, while you lie to yourself and everyone else about what you’re so angry about and pretend it’s borne of wisdom. The only thing that ever did work, that. The only thing that ever mattered.

 

 _There_. A shadow blots out the blue and white night for a lingering second and time does actually give up altogether and stop, even as everything else remains in motion, like the ice cold skittering across Fran’s skin, the tiny fine hairs on her body rising, her heart trying to punch its way out of her chest. She keeps her eyes open even though she doesn’t want to see it again, the thing that just went past the window, _the figure_ , undeniably in the shape of a man, strolling past unconcerned despite hovering in the air. Fran wills herself to watch, breathing in short, shallow bursts, feeling light-headed with fear even though she’s lying down. A few moments and more lightning, but nothing happens, blinking and waiting and wondering when she’ll be satisfied that she’s asleep and dreaming or awake and hallucinating.

 

It might have been nothing at all, just some fleeting trick of the dark, guilt and necked alcohol throwing up some nasty shapes. No, _oh god_ , it isn’t because it’s back now, moving even more slowly, silhouetted but indisputable, and it stops in the window, undeterred by the blinding lightning and horizontal rain and _gravity_ , and swivels around to see her, cocks its head. It takes so long she has time to beg in whispers, _please please please_ , and when it’s still there, screw her eyes shut tight.

 

And just like that, all the noise is gone along with whatever it is she saw, the constant emphatic roar of the storm doesn’t just dissipate, it disappears, no wind, no rain clattering thinly against the windows. The lightning remains though, still strobing through her eyelashes. She’d think she’d gone deaf if it weren’t for her jagged breathing. With the kind of reluctance that suggests that maybe you really shouldn’t do what you’re about to at all, she relaxes one eye, lets it open a fraction of a fraction, another, breathless and taut and about to decide between fight or flight. But it’s not there, it’s gone. She takes a breath, a second, unlocks her muscles, struggles onto to one elbow- 

 

The door to her room starts to slam rhythmically, open and closed, _bang bang bang_ , like a metronome keeping time, obliterating the silence and the memory of everything that came before it in an unholy clamour. Fran twists off the bed, lands hard on her side because her hands are covering her ears. All of the doors have taken up the cadence, every single one in the entire hotel banging open and shut in time. Maybe they were all going from the beginning, it’s hard to remember when your brains are being liquefied by sound. Trying to crawl away, maybe to get to Eilish, maybe to die under the bed, squirming on elbows and knees with only the burning rawness of her throat to suggest that she’s screaming.

 

The doors shut with a final booming slam. There is a second of nothing, then distant glass breaks, a man’s voice wails somewhere not far enough away. Fran curls up on her bruised side against the worn pile of the carpet and starts to sob, hands in loose fists over her ears still, as if that’s going to help a thing. It’s astonishing how quickly she has been reduced to uselessness. Outside, the storm picks up where it left off but with more vehemence, like a living thing bent on senseless revenge.

 

Rolling shakily onto her hands and knees, dripping tears and snot and hiccupping on every other breath, Fran whispers, “Oh fuck, okay, okay.” The next step, after having a bit of a talk with herself, would be to get up, put some clothes on her bottom half, open the door, open the other one directly in front of her, pick Eilish up off the floor and get the fuck out of this place more than immediately. She gets as far as the leggings. The brass of the doorknob sings with cold, sticks to her palm so that she has to wrench it away and leave a great deal more of her skin on it than she wants to. Another try, this time with a towel left draped over the desk chair, is thwarted when images and feelings push their way past the basic human panic already crowding her thoughts, horrible things like rotting foxes and plane crashes, George Mallory lifting his leathery head from the ice and looking at her, the man walking by the window opening it and coming in...Her free-falling guts drag her down to her knees and back on her hands, as she shakes her head as hard and fast as she can to dislodge the horrors piling on top of each other.

 

Dimly, Fran registers something thumping at the door, trying to get in, get to her, hurling its malevolent bulk at the shuddering wood over and over and over and...Between flashes of the abyss and swarming cockroaches, she heaves over onto her backside and tries to scuttle away from whatever is it like a crab, but gives up and cowers when the strobing lightning reveals all of the antagonists of her childhood nightmares around the room, closing in, gone the next moment, back again closer, gone, almost there. And that's when time gets fast, accelerates unbearably, when she knows what she would do if she had just a few minutes more.

 

A blow against the door, and with a ping and a spark, the doorknob falls off. Another and it swings open to bounce against the wall and frame the most beautiful sight Fran has ever beheld, Eilish, barefoot in rainbow leggings and holding a fire axe, extending a hand to her in the stuttering light. “Come, Fran.” Fran can’t move so Eilish does it for her, taking a quick few steps over to her crumpled form, pulling her to her feet by the hand and out of the room to face everything together.    

 

-8-

_And lovers will die_

_And lovers will rise past the darkness we’ve seen_

_So stop telling lies_

_And start falling blind in the deepest of seas_

 

A few feet away from the door, her terror beginning to recede as adrenalin floods her blood, Fran jogs a few steps to reach Eilish’s side, catches her by the wrist.

 

“Eil, wait, stop.”

 

She turns back and peers at Fran anxiously. “What, are you okay?”

 

“No, just-” And Fran makes the half-lunge to Eilish’s mouth, kissing her with the desperation of years of repeating the same mistake and being granted one last chance. She hears a dull metallic thud as the axe hits the carpet. There is no hesitation in Eilish either, her lips part at the touch of Fran’s, and she pulls at the neck of Fran’s t-shirt until they wobble to a rest against the wall. The thing is, it isn’t safe in this hallway, not when you’ve got your eyes closed and your ears are roaring with relief and want, so that you’re deaf and blind and otherwise distracted. But Fran can’t make herself stop, even with impending death lurking in every corner, because normally kissing is _rubbish_ , acrobatic tongues and drool all over. But this, this is perfect angles and telepathy, this is everything falling into place - this is, Fran supposes, love. Eilish sighs into her mouth like she knows. And Fran can’t think of a good enough reason yet to break the kiss, its wet roaming heat seems like it might be enough to live on, but then her tongue starts to go a bit numb from the sweet sharp taste of Eilish’s spit.

 

She pulls back and rests their foreheads together, not quite able to forego touching.

 

“Did you steal my bus vodka?”

 

“Oh,” Eilish laughs breathlessly, “yeah, I did. Oops.”

 

“And why did you do that?” She’s laughing too, she doesn’t care. She wants to chase the taste of pilfered vodka in Eilish’s mouth for what little is left of the rest of their lives.

 

“To annoy you, like everything else.”

 

“You’re obsessed with me.” She says without rancour, smiling and sweeping a fall of hair out of her eyes.

 

“Well, yeah.”

 

Fran never did let go of her wrist, so she starts pulling her along the hall again, waiting only a few seconds to let her fetch the axe. “We need to find the others and get out of here,” but Eilish just stumbles uselessly for a few paces, sagging heavily against her. “Woah, woah, are you alright?” She pushes her into a bench just where the corridor is split by a short hall that leads to the lifts and crouches in front of her to try to see her face properly in the short bursts of light.

 

“Yeah, I’m fine. I’m just a bit...wobbly, you know, after getting past my slamming door and taking that axe off the wall and getting you out and then you decide to stop being such a massive fucking idiot for the first time in about 4 years. It’s a lot, I can’t breathe.” She’s breathing too much really, hyperventilating lightly now that the heroics are over and there are all kinds of hormones, some from fear and some from kissing, racing through her bloodstream.

 

“Okay. We’ll just sit for a minute and you’re going to breathe more slowly,” she nods in agreement and drops her head forwards, inhales through her nose. Fran rises from her crouch, settles in next to her on the bench, rubs her back through the thin jersey, feeling the familiar delicate bumps of her spine against her palm.

 

“What are we going to do now?”

 

“We’re going to find the others and we’re going to get on the coach and we’re going to go somewhere where whatever’s happening here isn’t. You were down at reception longer than I was. Do you know which rooms people got?”

 

“I know we’re the only guests and they had to put some people on different floors because it’s the off-season and some of the wings are shut, but I don’t know which and I don’t know who.” Her breathing is easing, she’s starting to tremble which strikes Fran as both normal and concerning at once.

 

No way around it, she keeps her palm moving smoothly against Eilish’s back so she knows that whatever she answers is alright. “And everyone got their _own_ room?”

 

She unbends, looks her defiantly in the eyes. “Yes.” Good. They’ll just have to figure out where the groupie got to. They carry on like this for another minute or two until Eilish gets cautiously to her feet. “Let’s finish checking this floor together and we’ll split up at the stairs at the end down there,” she gestures down the corridor, lost in inky black.

 

They hurry forward, using only the intermittent floods of lightning to guide them, and almost inevitably Eilish stumbles as she’s leading the way, felled by something big, something that definitely shouldn’t be there. It’s Martin, lying on his back in the middle of the floor, no sign of how he got there. Fran pries the phone from his cooling fingers, turns if off and tucks it into the waistband of her leggings next to her own. Eilish wanders warily back from the bookshelf behind which she’d taken a moment to pull herself together. There isn’t time to do anything respectful for him, so Fran steps over the body and keeps moving to the staircase she knows lies somewhere past where the procession of doors and furniture ends.

 

“His face is gone,” Eilish says from somewhere behind Fran.

 

“I know, don’t look.”

 

At the stairs, Fran takes her by the shoulders, stands too close so she’ll have to look up. “Anything happens, _anything_ , you scream and I’ll be there as soon as I can.” She makes her wrap her fingers tightly around the axe handle, squeezes them. “Use this if you need to. I know you know how.” And weighing how long it will take to kiss Eilish again versus how quickly they need to leave, Fran settles for running two fingers down her cheek in the abject darkness of the stairwell because you remember a touch longer than anything else, don’t you? It’s probably too reverent a gesture, but she’s far past caring.

 

Once on the floor above, she pads slowly past the dozens of empty rooms standing open, scanning them briefly when the lightning hits and then moving on. Above all, it’s best to try not to think and to keep moving; she has the vague certainty that if she lets herself reflect on their predicament, give it a moment’s analysis or articulation, she won’t be able to peel herself off the floor. Nearly two-thirds of the way down the corridor, she spots them and knows right away: two slumped forms in the distance, inert in the fleeting light. She circles close enough to make sure, but not to glean any specifics. They are both prone, halfway in and halfway out of the opposite doorways of their rooms. It looks as though they died reaching for each other across the breach. 

 

Fran comes to the floor Eilish is meant to be on, breathless from running and the dawning panic that she should never have left her alone. She rushes forward as quickly as she can in the long stretches of complete darkness and still she can’t see her at the halfway point. Fran makes herself stop for a few deliberate breaths, forced slow and even, and scrutinises the short hall to the lifts on her left, the rest of the corridor ahead. Three short bursts of lightning in a row and she catches something twinkling a few feet ahead. It takes five dragging steps and an entire lifetime to get to it.   

 

On the wall, a handprint in blood and glitter, trailing five smeared lines down the hallway.

 

She can’t tear her eyes away from it when she shouts, “Eilish!” It’s loud and startling, even above the howling wind. The next second she snaps into motion, sprinting along the carpet, following the trails left by bloody fingertips like they’re breadcrumbs. Just as it seems she’s about to run out of corridor, she looks down and ahead, skidding just short of kicking Eilish in the head where she’s sitting on her heels on the floor. Fran slumps to her knees behind her in relief, puts her hands on her shoulders and squeezes to try to convince her still-panicking body that she’s found her.   

 

“She’s dead,” Eilish says. Fran lifts her head to peer over her shoulder at the body in considerable disrepair before them.

 

“I know.” Might as well tell her, “So are Josh and James. Eilish where is the blood on the wall coming from? Is it yours?”

 

She raises her right hand and angles it so that Fran can see a gash across the palm, darkly pumping blood down her wrist and arm. Eilish is always soft-spoken, but now her voice sounds hollow and brittle, like sand. “She’s dead because of me.”

 

It’s just her hand, then. The way she huffs air out is a bit disrespectful, shouldn’t sound so much like relief. “This isn’t because of you. I don’t know what this is, but it’s nothing to do with you.”

 

“But if I hadn’t brought her, she wouldn’t be dead.” She doesn’t sound sad exactly, more filled with a kind of horrified wonder, like she’s reading a fairy tale.

 

Fran shivers and shuffles around to her side. “Maybe. Show me your hand.” It’s deep and wide and still bleeding all over everything.

 

“I only did it to annoy you.”

 

“She wasn’t your prisoner or anything.” Not a single thing to wrap around it to staunch the flow...nothing except the neon yellow scrunchie around Kitti’s slim wrist. Fran snatches it before Eilish has time to stop her and rips at the seams with her teeth, pulls the elastic in opposite directions until it snaps. “And this might not just be happening here. It might be happening everywhere in the world and then she would be dead anyway.” She wraps the strip of fabric around Eilish’s palm, ties the ends together and tucks them under. The makeshift bandage smells sickeningly of the dead girl’s hair.

 

“Why aren’t we dead?”

 

“Because you saved me. How did you get hurt?”

 

Eilish points with her good hand to a heap of metal a few feet away. “It was him, the knight. He had her on his sword, he picked her up with it, through her-” Her recitation gives way to a gag. She closes her eyes and breathes through her nose for a long moment. When she opens them again, she fixes Fran with an expression of open anguish. “I didn’t understand that he was real because he wasn’t, he isn’t, but then he heard me and turned and I forgot about the axe for a second and that’s when he swung down with his sword, so I put my hand up.” She looks back at the pile of armour. “I got him then, though.”

 

Fran heaves Eilish to her feet by the armpits and holds her face in one hand. “We are getting the fuck out of here. We’re going to go downstairs to find Wojciech and the keys to the coach, right now.” And as she passes the knight, she picks up his sword and drags it behind her on the carpet, wiping Eilish and Kitti’s blood off as she goes.

 

It’s Eilish who thinks of it, to look for Wojciech where he is most likely to be in any given situation. He’s even still sitting in the chair, slumped forward at a bank of darkened fruit machines in the bar. Both of his arms are well up one of them’s slot and that, coupled with the fine haze of acrid smoke still hanging in the air and the reek of burnt hair, has Fran thinking that he may not have died like the others. “He could have just electrocuted himself, the poor cretin.” They stare at him for a few moments, then at each other over his head. “I’m going to try his pockets for the keys.”

 

“Wait, won’t you get shocked, too?”

 

“I don’t think the power’s coming back on anytime soon. Here, hold this,” handing Eilish her sword. Even if she doubts at this point that there will ever be electricity again, she works quickly, yanking the keys when she finds them right away in his right pocket and then shuddering all over from touching a corpse. “Let’s go!”

 

Sliding in their socks on the black and white marble floor, drifting around corners, their race to the coach starts to feel like something approaching fun, nearly gets all the way there until they glide to a halt, crashing into each other at the threshold of the huge dining area Fran had found earlier. All of the hysterical, defiant enthusiasm they’ve built up in the last minute gushes out of them at the sight of the silhouetted shapes ambling on the ground and off it outside, just beyond the set of French doors. A huge, dark shape, bigger than anything that lives on land or in the sky, floats by.

 

“Oh shit,” whispers Eilish. “Can they see us?”

 

“I don’t know.” One of them, something indistinct, stops and pivots towards the doors. At the same time, two of the old cane-backed chairs around a far table hurtle through the air and explode with a crash of wood and nails on the wall just above their heads. Fran grabs Eilish’s hand and together they run careening helplessly back to the reception area and after a few frantic glances around, they head in tandem to a door left ajar just off of the main desk, knowing from years of touring that this is the luggage room and that it will lock. Inside, Eilish scrabbles at the door handle until she finds the small button to push to bolt it. They slide down opposite walls of the narrow little room until they’re seated facing each other, feet alternating between them.

 

It isn’t pitch darkness because a high, tiny little window admits a weak dark blue glow from outside. Enough apparently for Eilish to see wet catching the light on Fran’s cheek. She leans forward, touches her face. “Don’t cry.”

 

“I wish we still had bus vodka.”

 

“Me too. Come here.” And she pulls at Fran’s shirt again, shuffles her around until she’s sitting between her legs, her back and head against Eilish’s chest. Fran feels Eilish lift pieces of hair off her neck, wind them back around her bedraggled bun where they belong, tuck the ends in the way she likes. “What shall we do now?”

 

There are a few moments when she’s not sure her voice won’t wobble and then she says, “We’ll wait until dawn. That should be in about two or three hours now? I have two phones in my leggings-”

 

“I know, I can feel them.”

 

“I’ll turn mine on so we know what time it is and we’ll save Martin’s for when we need it.” She holds the button down and white apple pops up on the screen. It’s 4:39 am. E shows intermittently between long stretches of No Service. “In the morning, we’ll go outside no matter what. I don’t think it’s much safer in here, not really. But at least we’ll be able to see what’s coming.” She runs out of breath, of ideas.

 

“That’s a good plan, Franny,” croons Eilish to her, stroking her hair with slowing, hot hands.

She must sleep for a while then because the last thing she remembers is one cautious fingertip dragging against the line of her jaw until the buzz of her phone against her arse like bees jolts her awake, the back of her head smashing into Eilish’s chin. “Ow.”

 

“Sorry.” She looks at the screen, holds it over her shoulder to show Eilish who it is, and slides her thumb across the green strip to answer.

 

“Fran? _Fran?_ Jesus fucking Christ, is that you?”

 

“Yeah, hi Cam.”

 

“Oh my god, I thought I’d never speak to you again! Where are you?” There is a lot of background noise, an apocalyptic soundtrack of sirens and screaming. She holds the phone away from her ear, screws up her face. He’s shouting so she doesn’t have to put it on speaker for Eilish to hear.

 

“Yorkshire.”

 

“Are you...are you alright? Is it happening there, too? London is...London’s on fire, Fran. And freezing.” Loud steps running past somewhere near him. He says more intently, as if she might not believe him. “There are things in the sky, it’s-”

 

“Yeah, I’ve got to go, actually.”

 

“What?”

 

“I’ve got to go, I’m with Eilish.”

 

“Hi Cameron!”

 

“And, well, I don’t really want to talk to you. I mean, if the world’s ending and everything. I have better things to do.”

 

Eilish slides her arm across the front of Fran’s shoulders, bends to kiss her neck and then leans towards the phone. “Bye Cameron!” she shouts just as sunnily.

 

Silence, except for the symphony of car alarms and human misery in the background, then, “You fucki-”

 

She taps the screen to end the call, leans back against Eilish, who is still busy at her neck rubbing her chapped lips against the skin there.

 

“So it isn’t just us. Do you feel better about Kitti now?”

 

“Who?”

 

“That girl you brought along.”

 

“Oh, was that her name?”

 

“Jesus, Eil.” Horrified and mildly amused, that particular mix of emotions so specific to interactions with her.

 

“It didn’t come up! We just talked about you the whole time anyway.” She rests her cheek on Fran’s shoulder, speaks quietly against her neck. “Does that meant this _is_ the end of the world then?”

 

Fran raises up on her elbows, twists so that she’s facing her. “I don’t know, it could be.”

 

“I hope we survive and everyone else dies.”

 

“That’s nice.”

 

“I don’t really care about anyone else, do you?” The look on her face suggests that a lot hinges on Fran’s answer.

 

She barely even has to think about it. “No.”

 

“This is where you want to be then?”

 

“You have to ask that?”

 

“Yes, I fucking well do!” And she’s isn’t joking now, there are four years of heartbreak in the hard lines of her glare.

 

“This is where I want to be. Not hiding in this luggage closet, not in this haunted deathtrap hotel, but with you, yes.” That makes her smile, despite everything. “The end of the world won’t be as amusing as you’re imagining, I don’t think. There won’t be electricity. No heat, no music, no shops.”

 

“No phones, Fran.”

 

“No eyeliner. Eil, no coke.”

 

Eilish affects shock. “Wait, coke or _coke_?”

 

“Both.”

 

“Noooooooo,” she pretends to wail, face pressed to Fran’s chest.

 

“It’ll be boring.”

 

“No, it’ll be brilliant.” She wriggles up straight, face shining with renewed enthusiasm, always so incredibly changeable. “We’ll make all our own clothes.”

 

“You already do that,” Fran reminds her, plucks at her t-shirt as an example.

 

“Yeah, but now _everyone_ will have to and they’ll all look _rubbish_ and we’ll look amazing.” She’s started weaving their legs together again like she used to, like willow branches for a basket.

 

Fran laughs quietly through her nose. “What about at night? What’ll we do then?”

 

“Hmmm,” tapping a finger to her bottom lip, “what are we going to do at night…”

 

“Besides that.”

 

“Nothing. I’ll just stare at you.”

 

“Because that’s not creepy.”

 

“You’re always making ridiculous faces about everything, it’ll be like telly.”

 

Fran then tries very hard not to make one, not to roll her eyes, fails utterly. “Right, and that’s all you need, is it?”

 

“Yeah, just you. And some candles.”

 

Fran smiles because she hopes it’ll burst the sudden swell of emotion choking her. She looks to the little grimy window and then glances down at her phone. 5:57 am. Leaning forward, she kisses Eilish again, a soft push of lips and some shared breath, just enough to remember.

 

“Ready to go outside?”

 

-9-

S _o maybe we lie down_

_And we kiss there on the ground_

_As we’re taken by the ice_

_And in fact it might be nice_

 

The first thing that stops them in their tracks, just outside the main entrance to the hotel is the incongruous cold. When they’d both shivered all night, Fran attributed it to fear and a lack of sleeves. But out here, it’s clear something’s wrong. Well, that’s an understatement. The grass crunches white underfoot and the vast flooding puddles left by the storm are already covered in thick crusts of streaked ice. Even wrapped into the ancient bellhops’ uniforms they found and too-big boots, the cold makes it hard to breathe so that the extra clothing makes no difference.

 

The second sight pinning them to the front drive is the primeval sky, yawning savage and elemental above them, the way it must have looked, Fran somehow knows, before there were people to see it. There aren’t that many stars in space, let alone over Yorkshire. Even tinged orange with the coming dawn, there are hundreds of thousands to be seen almost as if there is now less atmosphere for them to hide behind. And lightning, strobing to its own ill-timed beat every second or less, pink, green, blue, white and silent.  

 

Finally and most notably are the things that they’d only seen in silhouette until now, the translucent shapes in shades of white floating all around them, like ink billowing through water, lazy and inexorable. _Ghosts_ , supplies Fran’s brain simply. Roundheads and Cavaliers, Picts, knights, peasants, Vikings, long-lost tribes and murder victims, women, horses, men, cats and dogs and children - all are wheeling through the twilight, aimless, harmless, impossible. Then, more worrying still, they notice the bigger things, things they don’t recognize. Fran doesn’t want to think about what they are even though she knows exactly. She’d always had trouble picturing them anyway.

 

Eilish speaks first, “I thought it was supposed to be hot in hell.” The sun reaches above the rolling horizon of the Peak District, but it doesn’t get any warmer; in fact, Fran notices that her tears have frozen white in her eyelashes. Eilish is coughing now, every few pluming breaths.

 

“Let’s get to the coach.” They abandon the axe and the sword, hobble over as swiftly as they can on frozen legs, darting around ghosts of people and animals, all running dumbly into and through each other, until they finally reach the door. Fran’s numb fingers bump uselessly against each other in the shallow uniform pockets until she turns it inside out in frustration and the key drops to the ground. She manages to get it between her thumb and index finger, holding them together with her left hand, while Eilish guides her wrist up to the lock. It grows so dark so suddenly then that they can’t see what they’re doing anymore.

 

“What’s that?” wonders Eilish. A churning wall of white is moving apace towards them from the east, where it has already exterminated the sun. It billows forward, as high and wide as everything, pale and impenetrable so that you can’t see what it’s leaving in its wake, but you can certainly guess it isn’t good. Fran knows, knows right away with the ancient part of her brain that has brought them this far already, that the thing is made of frost and being in the coach or not is not going to make any difference when it sweeps up the last peak to where they’re standing.

 

Eilish has clearly thought the same thing. “Can we outrun it?”

 

Fran watches for a few seconds. The Concorde couldn’t outrun it. “No.”

 

“What shall we do?” asks Eilish with the quiver of tears in her voice because she already knows the answer. If Fran can make one last decision, it’s that she isn’t going to die on that fucking coach.

 

“Let’s just...let’s just lie down here and talk.”

 

“You pick your fucking moments.”

 

“I know.” She drops to her knees on the brittle, frozen grass, reaches for Eilish. They lie down, close, hands clasped and facing each other. Tears freeze in the corners of Eilish’s eyes.

 

Fran huddles closer, pushes the tips of their noses together so that when she speaks, Eilish will feel a last bit of warmth.

 

“It’s going to be okay.”

 

“It isn’t though.”

 

“We’re together. It’ll be fine.”

 

“I wish you’d been like this all along.”

 

“I’m sorry.”

 

Eilish pulls off her glove with her teeth, lays her hand on Fran’s cheek. “I know.”

 

“I love you.”

 

“I know.”

 

“Look at me, don’t look at anything else,”

 

“I won’t. I love you, too.”

 

“I know.”

 

And they only close their eyes when the ice takes them.

 

***

 

Fran feels her lungs, _hears them_ snap open like sails, as she arches with the first huge rush of breath. Thin and brittle like gasping into a paper bag. Something cool and smooth on her chest and then agony as everything tenses and resets itself and she has to fight to make her useless lungs expand and contract again. The pressure on her chest comes back and she strikes out at it. And oddly, it withdraws to the sound of cheering.

 

She can hear and feel, taste decay in her mouth before she can see anything, just knifing white glare at first. She thinks, _I’m dead_ and then, _I've gone blind_. She begins to cry in utter bewilderment, but there is a practiced gloved hand on her cheek and the light begins to resolve itself into halos and flares, and then dimly, the shape of a person. Blinking furiously, the tears help, the outlines sharpening into a man. A very, very tall man swims in and out of view. Maybe he isn’t a man at all, it’s just the bulk of him in his white hazmat suit that makes her think so.

 

Being able to see a bit isn’t helping her confusion at all. She’s in a room with the one man, everything is cloyingly white, like a short-sighted vision of the future, and about 20 feet in front of her, behind a barrier she can’t actually discern, a celebrating cluster of white-clad giants, their faces uncovered, crying and hugging and cheering. Like it’s the fucking moon landing or something.

 

The man leans down, says something to her she doesn’t understand. Fran lets her head fall back on the sort of ceramic table she’s on, trying not to dissolve into sobbing like a baby, scanning desperately around for anything familiar like a fork or a piece of paper or some shoes or _something_. She twists away from the gibberish he’s speaking to her and squirms onto her right side to shut all of this out, closes her eyes... and opens them again to make sure, and then does start to weep properly. Because there, just five feet away, lies Eilish, on the same kind of table, blue and a bit mangled, but alive, watching her. And smirking.

 


End file.
